Shout at the devil: the confusing world of talking to computers

Tweet Share In the last six months, every major tech company has unveiled its vision for the future of computing. And funnily enough, they’re all saying the same thing: in the future, we’re going to talk to our computers — and they’re going to answer back. Microsoft calls it “conversation as a platform.” Google says it wants to computers to have an “ongoing two-way dialogue” with their users. This both is and isn’t a metaphor. Digital assistants that we talk to — Siri, Alexa, Cortana — are already commonplace, but creating computers that talk back will mean something extra: using machine learning to offer users prompts and suggestions. “Our goal with artificial intelligence is to build systems that are better than people at perception,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. “[At] seeing,…